That is not as much as some, but in his view the company's planned change is unnecessary.

"The reason [given] was that people were going to live longer and the fund was very poor [but] people have been living longer for a long time and the fund is in a healthy state," Alan Shears said.

"The real reason is they want to make the business more profitable for them and then sell it on."

The health of the fund is disputed by Unilever, which says it was in deficit to the tune of £680m at 31 March 2010, requiring the company to pump in extra money.

This cut no ice with strikers like Don Jenkins, a production worker at Pot Noodle for 20 years.

He has calculated that he will lose £56 a week in pension when he retires.

"They gave us a pension contribution holiday five or six years ago. We are hoping this will bring them back round the table," he said.

The boss's salary

Jeff Woods, a full-time official for Unite, claims that Unilever does not seem interested in talking, now that the required 60-day formal consultation on the pension change is over.

"They have walked away thinking the individual employees would not react - I don't think they have actually calculated what it means to these long-standing employees," he says.

Image caption
The workers want the company to resume negotiations, says union official Jeff Woods

Unilever denies this.

"At no stage have we underestimated the strength of feeling that making these changes has evoked," it said.

However Jeff Woods argued that feeling is also being stoked up by the big contrast between staff pay and senior executive pay at the company.

"Mr Polman [Unilever chief executive] has just been given a 50% remuneration package increase, which makes it 285% more than the average worker of Unilever," Jeff Woods says.

He disputed Mr Polman's recent assertion, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, that employees were pricing younger recruits out of potential jobs if pension schemes enabled staff to retire on 50%, 60% or 70% of the final salaries.

"I would be happy to live on a pension of 40% of his wages ," says Jeff Woods.

"[A pension of] 40% of these workers' salaries is on the poverty line."